Mrs. Clingerman suggests that extra-terrestrial visitors on Earth might also have mixed motives . . .
Everybody has his own way of weathering a hangover. Maggie’s husband’s way was to ignore the whole matter, stoutly denying, if pressed, that he suffered at all. Maggie never denied Mark the right to this brave pretense, but she had long ago rioted that on such days the family car needed a great deal of tinkering with, which necessitated Mark’s lying down under it or in it for several hours. Maggie refused any such face-saving measures. Right after breakfast on the day after the party she took to her bed, fortified with massive doses of B1, a dull book and, for quiet companionship, Gomez, the cat.
The window cooler hummed invitingly in the darkened bedroom; the curtains belled out in the breeze, and Maggie, shedding everything but her slip, climbed gratefully into bed. The book was called Hunting Our Feathered Friends With a Camera, and Maggie, who knew nothing of photography or birds, began to read it in the hope of being bored into sudden sleep.
Sleep had been very elusive lately. It was silly of her to become so disturbed over shadows ... or, more often, the lack of shadows. But how to explain her uneasiness to Mark, or to anybody? Once, last night at the party, she’d come very close to asking her friends for help or, maybe, just sympathy—the talk had turned to ghosts and hauntings—but luckily she’d called back the words before they’d formed. The whole thing was too nebulous to talk about. From the first, Mark had labeled it paranoiac, laughing at her wide-eyed account of something that looked at her in the bathroom, trundled after her to the bedroom, then watched her in the kitchen while she pared potatoes. When Mark had asked where for pete’s sake was there room in that small kitchen for a secret watcher, Maggie had shut up. Not for worlds would she leave herself open to Mark’s delighted shouts (she could just hear him) by answering that question.
“If I’d said: ‘on top of the refrigerator,’” Maggie thought drowsily, “I’d never have heard the last of it.”
...The hunting urge is deeply ingrained in man. It is no longer necessary to hunt for food; take a camera in your hands and stalk your prey. The prime hunter, anyway, from the days of the caveman, has been the artist, tracking down and recording beauty...Allow your children and yourself the thrill of the chase; satisfy this primitive urge with a safe weapon, the camera. Patience do not harm the nests natural setting...build yourself a blind...patience...catch them feeding...mating ... battling ... patience ... quick exposure ... patience ...
Maggie slept
Minutes later she woke to find Gomez, the cat, sitting on her stomach. She and Gomez, good friends, regarded each other gravely. Gomez, aware that he had her full attention, tossed his head skittishly.
“You woke me,” Maggie accused.
“Mmm-ow-rannkk?” He was giving her the three-syllable, get-up-and-feed-me treatment. Maggie was supposed to find this coaxing irresistible.
“Blast and damn,” Maggie said gently, not moving. Gomez trod heavily towards her chin.
“All right,” Maggie muttered. “But stop flouncing. Whoever heard of a flouncing tomcat—”
Both Maggie and Gomez froze, staring at something close to the ceiling.
“Do you see it, too?” Maggie rolled her eyes at Gomez, which so terrified him he immediately began evasive action—bounding off the bed, stumbling over her shoes, caroming off her desk, falling into the lid of her portable typewriter, his favorite sleeping spot. Gomez cowered deep in the lid, one scalloped ear doing radar duty for whatever danger hovered.
“That’s my brave, contained cat.” Maggie crooned through her teeth. She raised herself up on her elbows to stare at one corner of the ceiling; her eyes moved slowly with the slow movement there. But was it movement? Strictly speaking, it was not. Only some subtle shifting of the light in the room, she thought. That was all. The ceiling was blank and bare. Gradually the tumult of her heart subsided. Maggie caught sight of her face in the dressing table mirror. She was interestingly pale.
“It’s all done with mirrors, Gomez, and who’s afraid of a mirror? Neither you nor I... a car went by, or a cloud. Take one cloud, a mirror, and a hangover; divide by . .. Wait a minute. I just thought of something.”
Gomez waited, relaxing somewhat in his tight-fitting box. Maggie sat cross-legged in the middle of the double bed silently pursuing an elusive memory.
White face ... tents ... carnival... yes, the spider lady! It was one of the first dates I had with Mark, and how much I impressed him, because I saw through the illusion at once. There in the tent, behind a roped-off section, sat a huge, hairy spider with the head of a woman. The head turned and talked and laughed with the crowd, but glared at me when I began to point out to Mark the arrangement of the mirrors. It was all simple enough and fairly obvious, but not to Mark. Not to most people. Later, over coffee and doughnuts, I explained rather proudly to him that magic shows, pickpocket shows, that kind of thing, were always dull for me, because I could see so clearly what was really happening—that the way to look, to watch, was not straight on, but in a funny kind of oblique way, head tilted. Mark squeezed my hand then and made some remark about a crazy female who goes through life with her head on one side, seeing too deeply into things. . . .
It is nice to remember young love, Maggie thought, but I’m losing the track of that thought. Oh, yes . . . and then during the war there was the General at Mark’s basic training camp—he definitely lacked my peculiar ability— who came to check on the trainees’ camouflaged foxholes. Mark wrote me about it. The old boy cursed them all for inept idiots who couldn’t decently camouflage a flea, and then, right in front of the whole company and still cursing the obviousness of their efforts, stepped straight into one of the concealed holes and broke his leg. So ... ?
Maggie lay back on her bed, her usual abstracted look considerably deepened. Her mind wheeled around to the party last night. Something said or done then nagged at her now. What was it? It had been a good party. Nobody mad or sad or very bad. The summer bachelor had flitted about like an overweight hummingbird stealing sips of kisses . . . and almost drowned in the blonde, bless her. A mercurial young man had explained to Maggie what a bitch his first wife was, while staring rather gloomily at his second. The talk had ranged from ghosts to sex, from religion to sex, from flying saucers to sex, and everybody had come out strongly on the side of the angels and sex. The rocket engineer believed passionately in the flying saucers, but—that was it!
He’d said: “Maggie, it’s silly and sweet of you to hope for a deus ex machina, come to save civilization, but have you considered ye may mean nothing to them emotionally? Haven’t you ever watched ants struggling with a load too big for them? How much did you care? Even if, like God, you marked the fall of every sparrow, you might simply be conducting a survey or expressing colossal boredom, like the people who delight in measuring things. You know what I mean—if so and so were laid end to end . . .” And right there the talk had turned back to sex.
“So,” Maggie said aloud, “I’m being watched. Cataloged. Maybe photographed. Either that, or I’m nuts, loony, strictly for the birds.” She grabbed the dull book and began to read again, not quite sure what she was looking for. She studied the photographs in the book, and for the first time it struck her how self-consciously posed some of the birds looked. “Hams,” Maggie dismissed them. “Camera hogs.” She glanced at herself in the mirror, hesitated, then got up and combed her hair and lipsticked her mouth. In the mirror she could see Gomez peering cautiously from the typewriter lid toward a spot over the window cooler. The shadowy coolness of the room lightened for a moment, and Gomez’ eyes registered the change, but Maggie didn’t mind. She was posing sultrily and liking the effect. Maggie had decided to cooperate for the time being and give the unseen watcher an eyeful.